martedì 13 novembre 2007

Badge!

I work for one of Italy's most historic, influential and successful organisations. Today I discovered that as part of 'company policy' for all but senior management, if you badge in on your arrival in the morning even 1 minute late, you are automatically docked half an hour from your overtime. The same deal if you arrive a minute late from lunch. Apart from the fact that the badge culture is unacceptable in itself if you ask me - unless you're working in a chicken-stuffing factory in the 1970s - in any case, my protestations to the Human Resources department were met with "I know, it's a pain in the ass; it happens to us too...". I asked where this 'policy' comes from and who makes such decisions and all I got was a classic shrug, followed by "It's just always been this way..."I hear from my American colleagues that us 'English / North American' employees are considered to be the 'rompi-palle' ( ball busters ) of the organisation because we always complain about little mistakes on our payslips and question things that most of the Italians just accept. GOOD!!

4 commenti:

Humm, does this organization have branches in other countries? If so, I wonder if the "badge" rule is only in effect in the Italian branch or if it's procedure in other countries?I say this because I saw one of those political TV shows that reported on how a HUGE percentage of state-employees basically slack off all day. In the morning they check in and then leave 5 minutes later to run their own personal errands during work hours- which means they're not doing all the bureaucratic work they should be doing, which only leads to more chaos in the already chaotic administration. and then we wonder why it takes so long to get anything done in public offices (;

Ah ha! It seems the Italian "work ethic" (or lack of) could be the reason for this ridiculous badge system. For about half a year I was working in a strictly Italian workplace and was rather blown away by how often most of the people there neglected their work to do their own personal things like shopping, talking on the phone, putzing around on the Internet etc... But I agree with you, the badge system is stupid and somewhat offensive in a professional environment.